What I've noticed while working on most continents is that when people learn just a little English, they can communicate better than I can if I try to learn the

What I've noticed while working on most continents is that when people learn just a little English, they can communicate better than I can if I try to learn their language. The reason is, I think, that English grammar is, in a way, so redundant that even if the speaker use wrong grammar all the time the meaning often doesn't change. You can say "I is", which is wrong, but there's no problem with understanding (at least not for non-native English speakers who are so used to hear all kinds of wrong grammar). But make a single mistake in a Romance language like Italian, and suddenly your sentence "I'm stupid" now means "You're stupid". The grammar matters. In English the grammar, for the most part (not for everything, of course) is about correctness more than meaning - which is why the language is so robust, which is one reason it works as a lingua franca: A little English knowledge goes a long way.